The Amerisure Companies/Taliant Software

Sometimes you dont realize youre digging a big hole until you find yourself looking up and wondering how you got so deep. When they get there, some companies will keep diggingmaybe hoping to reach China or some other global market. Smarter companies take time out to examine why the hole got so deep and how theyre going to climb out of it.In this case, the smart company was AmerisureThe Amerisure Companies, actuallya regional property and casualty insurer primarily involved in workers compensation. Over the years, it had brought in a variety of disparate systems and spent extensive time trying to connect them all, according to Frank Petersmark, vice president of information technology for Amerisure.Then, three years ago, the company drew a line in the sand, Petersmark said. The company formed a strategic planning committee, and out of it came a long-term blueprint for technology at Amerisure. Included were an enterprise-wide data model and a plan to implement solutions that lived up to that model.Having developed a model, Amerisure could then approach software vendors to see how the model would work with each vendors system. We didnt expect to find anything that completely matched, Petersmark said.But to the companys surprise, Taliant Software did submit a product, PowerComp, that offered a close enough matchPetersmark estimates between 75 and 80 percent of functionalityand Amerisure sat up and took notice. That was a pretty high match, Petersmark admitted.Taliant designed PowerComp as a workers comp processing system, but Amerisure wanted it to do more. Although workers comp makes up approximately 60 percent of Amerisures business, it did not want to limit itself to a single-line operating system. The company saw something in PowerComp, believing it could be adopted for all its lines of business. The two companies agreed to partner in the projectTo make sure that Amerisure was in fact on a new pathone away from those disparate systemsPetersmark preached patience, and that is what the company is giving the project. Taliant licensed the product to Amerisure in May 2001, but the product will not go online until this July, according to Petersmark.Taliant was willing to let us drive where the system would go, Petersmark said. They also seemed to speak our language. They know insurance terminology and what the word coverage means. Thats not always true with other vendors.The PowerComp package offers five modules: Policyholder Services, Claims Management, Work Management, Shared Tools, and Administration Tools. Over the next few years, the two will be expanding the products uses.While there are a lot of antsy people at Amerisure who are waiting to get online with PowerComp, Petersmark likes to remind them: It took 20 years to get into this position, so its going to take a little while to get out of it. We needed time to do this right. It takes a little longer up front, but it will take less time for the other products as we go on.Amerisures people will be doing their jobs in a whole new way once this is complete, and that always causes some trepidation. They will come to like it eventually, because it will bring more information and more functionality to their fingertips, Petersmark said. There will be a significant training curve with the PowerComp product. We are using a train the trainer approach, Petersmark said, that will swing into full gear this month, four months before it goes online.The partnership with Taliant brought together quality people from both companies and that opened a tremendous line of communication between the two. ROBERT REGIS HYLE

THE PROBLEM: A HOST OF DISSIMILAR SYSTEMS, AND AN URGENT NEED FOR A LONG-TERM STRATEGY.